Incoming!

Geotagging Events, SXSW, Editing Comments and Venues

Ah, time for another long-overdue roundup. This episode: new geotagged events/venues, Upcoming at SXSW, comment editing, venue editing, attendee limits for private events, and new events since last login.

Geotagged Events and Venues

One of the most popular requests is for geocoded events and venues, but it's been a historically tricky problem because of the lack of good free tools and Upcoming's free-form nature. That changed with the release of Yahoo's free geocoder, so we've geocoded our U.S. events and venues and are geocoding new ones as they're created. (Right now, 73% of upcoming events are geotagged to the address level, and 97% with any level of geocoding.)

What does this mean? We've added geocode information to our API, with new options for searching for events or venues near a lat/long or street address.

We've also added geotagged data to every RSS events feed, allowing you to do things like this with no programming required. Try the new "Yahoo! Maps" option on any "Subscribe" button throughout the site -- including your own events, your friends' events, and any metro.

This geocode information also exposed a bunch of duplicate venues from users promoting to many metros, sometimes not even in the same state as the event itself. We've built some internal tools for merging and removing these duplicates, so you might notice these dupes when using the API until we finish our spring cleaning.

Upcoming.org at South by Southwest Interactive

After a week in San Diego for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, the Upcoming.org team (all three of us) headed to Austin for SXSW Interactive along with a few thousand geeks, bloggers, and corporate sellouts. (And, fortunately, hardly any business-y types.)

For us, it was thrilling to see Upcoming become the de facto way to find out all of the unofficial parties and shows. 900 unique Upcoming users watchlisted 67 SXSW events, several with hundreds of attendees each. We saw other conference attendees using Upcoming on their laptops, heard panelists mentioning us, met geeks who have mashed us up, and sites like Valleywag doing daily roundups of the nightlife on Upcoming.

One of the biggest events was the Flickr/Upcoming/Del.icio.us happy hour, held at the Iron Cactus. Leonard managed to get a great band to play, and we had rad t-shirts made for the occasion. (Yes! We have extras, and will be handing them out at other upcoming events.) Not surprisingly, it became the most popular event ever on Upcoming, with 390 attendees (the limit for the event) and another 145 people watching. If you missed it, you can live vicariously through Scott Beale's lovely photos, and the rest of the Flickr attendees.

We met so many of our users (new and old) for the first time, and you're all amazing. We love you, and you inspire us to keep making Upcoming better.

So, what else is new?

Edit/Delete Your Comments

As of last night, you can now edit and delete your own comments across the site. Yay, one more oft-requested feature down.

Venue Editing

You can now edit the venues that you've created. If you need to correct an error or add more info, go for it.

Maximum Attendees for Private Events

At SXSW, we had demand for parties with a limited guest list or venue capacity. If you're creating a private event, you can now optionally set a "maximum attendees" for the event. If your event hits the limit, the "attend" option goes away, though everyone can still watchlist the event.

New Events Since Last Login

We're now showing which events are new since your last login on event listing, with a big NEW! Is it too loud? Let us know if you have any ideas for something more subtle.